markus baur wrote:
> but even then the greek had infinitesimals and got awfully close to
> integral calculus (archimede if memory serves9
I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say "the Greeks had
infinitesimals". Archimedes did, and he came very close to integral
calculus. However, his techniques did not fit the Greek standards of
rigor, which is why he didn't tell anyone (as far as we know) except
Eratosthenes. The people who developed integral calculus in the modern
era were a bit more lax in their standards; Newton took heavy flak for
this from George Berkeley, and there were several attempts to clean
things up before the epsilon-delta formalism was introduced in the early
1800s.
Jim Parish